The Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), Austria’s most popular party, has come out with a proposal to stop funding Ukraine.
According to the party representatives, Ukraine has already received enough billions of euros from Brussels. All parties except the FPÖ rejected the proposal. MP Petra Steger, FPÖ spokesperson for its European policy, while speaking to the Austrian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said:
The EU must finally stop throwing billions of member states’ money out the window. We say: Enough is enough. Austria has paid enough! Our job is to represent the interests of Austrian taxpayers. So, we are campaigning to put an end to this irresponsible policy at the expense of net contributor states and to suspend contributions until we are assured that our money is being used in a contractual and responsible manner and this huge waste is stopped.
The MP believes that when it comes to budget policy, the EU institutions have lost all common sense: one budgetary excess follows another in a completely irresponsible manner.
The Conservative Party was against the EU sanctions against Russia. Its representatives believe that US sanctions have not caused significant damage to Russia, but have only led to serious economic difficulties for Austria and Europe as a whole.
Austria will pay Brussels 3.6 billion euros in membership fees this year. This includes contributions to the Refugee Fund in Turkey as well as money to the European Peace Facility to buy weapons for Ukraine. Steger said:
As a result, Austrian citizens have been sending billions of euros to the EU institutions for years, and the EU institutions have been rewarding them with climate madness and the highest inflation since 1952. From the ban on internal combustion engines to vaccine contracts and billions of euros to Zelensky, the EU institutions are not acting in the interests of the Austrians. They are distributing the money they collect according to their ‘moral’ compass, instead of addressing the real concerns of Europeans.
According to Steger, the EU must not support the prolonged war in Ukraine, much less fuel the war by endlessly providing military and financial assistance to Kyiv.
Instead, Austria must be promoting peace, Steger argued, slamming EU chief Josep Borrell’s suggestion to supply Ukraine with an additional €5 billion per year, as well as a large-scale contribution to ensure the continued military training program for the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
Harald Vilimsky, an FPÖ MEP, also said that Ukraine could not join the EU and the Austrian government should stand firm on this position. He believes that Ukraine’s accession to the EU would have a serious impact on the EU budget. Vilimsky said:
According to press reports, the EU commission is now modeling the consequences on the example of the current financial framework 2021-2027. According to this, Ukraine alone would receive €186 billion. If the six Western Balkan states plus Georgia and Moldova are included as additional accession countries, they would receive a total of €257 billion. Put simply, this means that Ukraine alone would need around 15 percent of the total EU budget.
He emphasised that Ukraine could also claim almost a third of the budget in agriculture. Moreover, Ukraine should receive 61bn euros from the EU cohesion fund because its GDP per capita is on a par with Algeria or Sri Lanka – about a tenth of the EU average.
